friday queue cleaning

So this week, I took a lighter approach with the blog.  So, the queue is quite full. So . . .

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Global warming.  I can’t keep up with it.  First, it’s over.  Then, it’s not over.  Then, it’s going to make us into cannibals.  Now, it seems that it’s been over for nearly 10 years?  Except that the last 10 years were the warmest on record?  I’m not a climatologist, so I don’t know what’s going on.  But, I enjoyed that El Nino (which is Spanish for “the nino”) is back into the discussion.  Apparently, El Nino is responsible for global warming, while La Nina (which I would assume is Spanish for “the nina”) is responsible for global cooling.  Also, it seems that the ocean surface temperature is not rising, which apparently it should be if global warming is real.  So, it’s all confusing.  But any time cannibalism and El Nino are part of a discussion, it’s good fun!

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Further frustrating environmentalists, it turns out that Earth Hour had pretty much no effect on energy usage during the hour it occur.  It seems to go that way a lot.  Recently, I’ve heard that recycling, with the exception of aluminum, is more harmful to the environment than just pitching things into the landfill.  Also, I’ve heard that using the energy efficient lightbulbs is bad because they contain mercury (did you know that the average fish contains more mercury than a rectal thermometer.  Would YOU eat a rectal thermometer?)  And, even the Toyota Prius may be more harmful than a gas guzzler (I didn’t read that article, so I don’t know why).  The problem, of course, is the amount of our consumption, not the efficiency of it.  But, nobody wants to make those types of sacrifices, right?

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First eggs are good for you.  Then they are bad for you.  Then they are good for you again.  And so on.  I’m not sure where it stands right now.  But, apparently, cell phones are the next great harbinger of cancer.  And, supposedly, it’s even worse than smoking.  We’ll see, I suppose.  The bad part is that “wolf” has been cried so often on these kinds of stories, it’s often difficult to take them seriously.

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Not only do they cause cancer, but there is now a “phobia” named for those who panic when they are without their cell phones, “nomophobia.”  Clearly, we are moving away from using Latin roots to name phobias (NO MObile=nomo).  Personally, I’m fine if I leave my phone at home, but we’ve all seen people who can’t sit 10 minutes without texting, talking, or whatever.  I always said that cell phones would be the downfall of our society. 

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Darrin Horn took the head coaching job at South Carolina earlier this week.  I’m happy that he got a major conference job, but I’m sad to see him go.  I first started paying attention to Western Kentucky basketball back during the 1993 NCAA tournament.  Horn was a sophomore on that team that made it to the Sweet 16.  As fate would have it, 2 years later I enrolled at WKU.  The basketball team was amazing that year, finishing 21st in the country and making it to the second round of the tournament and coming very close to knocking off Kansas to get the the Sweet 16.  More importantly, Diddle Area just rocked during home games.  It had the kind of energy that most would not believe possible at a mid-major.  Horn was a senior on that team.  And then, this year, he coached them to another Sweet 16.  My point being that Horn was a central part of my top 3 memories of WKU basketball.  For many, Coach Diddle is the face of the program, but for me, born years after the Diddle era, Darrin Horn is the face of WKU basketball for me.  So, it’s a tough loss, in my mind.

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Finally, the Democratic primary is a huge disaster right now.  It make work out in the end, but now, things look really bad.  First of all, you have the game of chicken gone horribly wrong with the DNC and Florida and Michigan.  The reality is, both sides never expected it to come to this.  Usually, by the time convention rolls around, delegates are just a formality.  So, back in the fall, it seemed that the DNC could get away with cutting delegates, since by the time convention came around the nomination would be secure and the nominee could push to seat the delegates and it would be a great show of party unity and all that.  Meanwhile, for Florida and Michigan, since primaries are usually more about momentum than delegates, they opted for momentum over delegates and went early.  But, since most candidates skipped out (due to DNC threats of punishment), little momentum came out of those states.  And, in a race likely to make it all the way to convention, delegates ARE going to matter.  Thus, this game of chicken has backfired, badly.  The DNC looks really bad, but really Florida and Michigan are to blame.  The rules may or may not have been unfair, but they were in place with the consequences clearly stated, and went ahead anyway.  There is a lot of mention of seating them anyway, but I don’t see a fair way to do it.  Essentially, Obama would be punished for following the rules that the DNC set forth. 

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Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign is losing it.  First of all, Hillary is making underdog pop culture references.  The last time I heard that, it was McCain in 2000, just before his run ended (Luke Skywalker in the death star).   Now, Clinton is just like Rocky.  Only, Rocky lost.  To carry the metaphor out to it’s fullest extent, she is fighting for pride without any chance of winning.  In reality, I don’t see that as being the case, but the way she is running her campaign right now is hurting both herself and Obama in the long run.  Either may be able to recover in the general election, but the more vicious this gets, the more their chances diminish.  What seemed like a Democratic slam dunk if Feburary is now going to be a much harder road to November.

Meanwhile, Bill has gone off the deep end.  He made some wild and crazy remarks to California superdelegates this past weekend.  Stuff that’s going to hurt his wife’s campaign.  I think one of his issues is that he is upset that Obama is a better politician than he is.  Really, Clinton was the smoothest politician of our lifetime.  Now it’s Obama.  I think Clinton gets that, and doesn’t like it.